Joseph // The Story You Live In

So this morning, as we're we're still easing into twenty twenty-five, we are going to uh we're gonna shine a spotlight on a new series to open up this year, okay?

So uh as we step into the year, we're gonna turn our attention to the story of Joseph in the Bible.

Okay, this is the first Joseph, not the second Joseph.

Um we are gonna turn our attention to the story of Joseph, and I will tell you why just here in a second.

I I believe it's gonna be important, um, especially as we come into February.

We're gonna give you in February, we're gonna paint a picture of some of the things that God is, we feel like God is calling us into for this year.

But as we're still kind of coming into the year, this is a great way for us to just kind of settle into some invitations, I believe, that God has for all of us, both here individually and as a church body.

Um this story of Joseph is a perfect and important piece of where I believe God is leading us as a church.

So we're gonna open up the scriptures and uh and start.

So uh if you have your Bibles, you can open up to Genesis chapter 37, okay?

Genesis 37 · chapter mention

And as you're turning there, I want to remind you that there are no important sporting events happening right now.

There's absolutely nothing else that should be consuming your attention.

No consequential football games for the state of Colorado, okay?

But if you are checking the score, please don't tell me.

And if you decide to cheer, please do it when I say something super powerful, right?

Just time it right, okay.

Jesus, we thank you for your word to us, and as we read your word, we thank you to animate the scriptures, God.

We're not reading dead words, we're receiving your voice, which is the bread of life.

We thank you to nourish us from the inside out, God.

So I'm gonna read this passage in Genesis 37.

It's a little bit longer to get some context for the story of Joseph, so just hang with me and we will get into it.

So starting in verse 1, Jacob lived in the land of his father's sojournings, in the land of Canaan.

These are the generations of Jacob.

Joseph, being 17 years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers.

He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah and his father's wives.

And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father.

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a robe of many colours.

But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all of his other brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him.

Now Joseph had a dream, and he was told, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more.

And he said to them, Hear this dream that I have dreamed.

Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright, and behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.

His brothers said to him, Are you indeed to reign over us?

Are you indeed to rule over us?

So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words.

Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers, and said, Behold, I have dreamed another dream.

Behold, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.

But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, What is this dream that you have dreamed?

Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?

And his brothers were jealous of him.

But his father kept the saying in mind.

Now his brother, his brothers went to pasture their father's flock near Shechem.

And Israel said to Joseph, Are you not your brothers?

Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem?

Come, I will send you to them.

And he said to him, Here I am.

So he said to him, Go now and see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock, and bring me the word.

So he sent him from the valley of Hebron, and he became and he came to Shechem.

And a man found him wandering in the fields, and the man asked him, What are ye seeking?

I am seeking my brothers, he said.

Tell me please, where are they pasturing the flock?

And the man said, They have gone away, for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan.

So Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan.

They saw him from afar, and before he came near to them, they conspired against him to kill him.

They said to one another, Here comes this dreamer.

Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits.

Then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him, and we will see what will become of his dream.

But when Reuben heard it, he rescued him out of their hand, saying, Let us not take his life.

And Reuben said to them, Shed no blood, throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand on him, that he might rescue him out of their hand to restore him to his father.

So when Joseph came to his brothers, they gripped him of his robe, the robe of many colours that he wore, and they took him and threw him into the pit.

The pit was empty, and there's no water in it.

Then they sat down to eat, and looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their car the camels bearing gum, bomb, and myrrh on their way to carry it down to Egypt.

Then Judah said to his brothers, What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?

Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let our and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.

And his brothers listened to him.

The Midianite traders passed by and they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver.

They took Joseph to Egypt.

Amen.

So this is an introduction into the life of Joseph.

What we read here is somewhat of the origin story.

The story of Joseph, you should know, is the longest singral narrative within the book of Genesis, spanning chapters 37 to 50.

It's actually longer than the story of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob.

And there is more emphasis put on his story than any other story in the book of Genesis.

And this whole story, as we find our way through this beautiful passage of scripture, it details Joseph's life of being born into the affection of his father, receiving a coat of many colors, but then but then being the subject of jealousy, being sold by his brothers into slavery at the age of 17.

It details his rise to power in Egypt.

And as we know, if you know the story, his eventual reunion with his family, and the saving of the nation of Israel.

Now, it's significant, it's a significant story in the biblical narrative because it's one of the clearest pictures from start to finish of how God is intimately involved in the details of our lives.

He is sovereign over human affairs, and he can turn anything the enemy meant for evil into good.

Come on.

It's the story of one young man who, over the course of 20 years, is tossed back and forth through betrayal and abuse, from favor and promotion, having to make his way through detours and delays in a foreign land, seemingly left on his own, yet standing strong in the midst of it.

And one of the kind of key questions I want to ask as we start this little journey together through the story of Joseph is this How do we remain steadfast when life goes in a dramatically different direction than we expected?

How do you and I, how does the church, how can we be the become the kind of people with a resilience and a steadfastness when things unfold differently than we expected or we were told?

Now, let me ask you this question.

How did you view the world at the age of 17?

I want you just to go back with me for a second.

Think of you at 17.

I want you to think about what you were thinking about at 17.

What were you interested in?

What were your desires?

And I want to think of think about where you're at right now.

Is life different than you expected at the age of 17?

Okay.

So let me show you a photo of me at 17.

This year.

Friends and family, this year is 17-year-old Lou Cumbrecht hailing from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Southside High School, class of 2001.

Ho there, there I am.

That's that's me and all my glamour, shot, glory, courtesy of Olin Mills, right?

Um and uh and you know, uh, there's probably a lot I could say about that photo right there.

But there's a lot at this particular age, 17 years old, senior in high school.

Uh a lot that, you know, when I think back, I went and pulled this photo out the other day and just like even reading back through my my my my yearbook, everything everybody signs in your yearbook.

Stay cool, don't change all these things.

Which none of those things are true.

No, I did not stay cool, and yes, I changed.

Um but I think about the things I didn't know would happen over the next two decades, right?

I didn't know that within a year or two that I would be leaving Fort Wayne, Indiana to coming out to Boulder, Colorado to be a part of this ragtag group, this discipleship group, this ministry training called Ninth Hour, right?

I didn't know that I would end up sticking around and actually planting roots and actually coming on staff at this church, right?

I didn't know that just a few years after this I would meet uh who is now my wife, Megan, and I would meet her right over here in this room, and then eventually marry her.

I didn't know that I would have three kids coming and all the joys and you know and challenges of learning how to be a father and a husband and a parent.

I didn't know I'd be a pastoring in an amazing church here in Boulder.

Um, and I also didn't know of some of the losses that were headed my way.

I didn't know how hard it was gonna be at certain times.

I didn't know how much marriage takes to really have a great marriage, how much you really have to invest in every single day.

And and and learning to love your wife and learning to love your children and finding new ways to love them and evolve with them and change with them, right?

I didn't know the hardships of leadership and how much you have to go through a crucible of just mistakes and just uh you know failures and and and learning on the go, like what works and what doesn't work, and who you are, who I am, and who I'm not.

Um I didn't know about the loss of friendships and and change that relationships change over time, and not everybody is in your life forever, and you have to you have to give them back.

I I didn't know of some of the pains and the hardships along the process.

I just I just knew how to stare into a camera and look pretty, right?

And bleach my hair.

So when you look at your life now, how is it different than what you expected at the age of 17?

See, most of us don't live our lives with a 10-year plan or a 20-year plan.

And even if you do, it probably unfolds about 30 seconds into that 10-year plan.

Something changes and it unfolds a little bit different than you thought.

We can't fully anticipate what life is gonna bring to us, right?

You cannot anticipate how people are going to treat you.

You cannot anticipate the potential of betrayal, you can't anticipate the potential of rejection, you can't anticipate how people and life situations are going to affect who you are and the journey that it takes you on.

You can't anticipate what comes against you and who the relationships that you will lose in the course of your life.

And even if you're a type A driven, goal-oriented person, which I know that there's many of us in here, right, you are still not as in control as you think you are.

And and we sometimes live with the illusion that the good life comes through managing our lives, controlling our circumstance in a way that avoids hardship, and that's where the good life is.

But what I want to propose as we kind of start this journey together, that what we see in the story arc of the life of Joseph that is that it is possible, it is possible to flourish with God in every season, even when you don't know what is coming your way, and furthermore, how God takes us through detours and delays in order to produce the life of God in us for the for our good and for the good of the world.

We can learn to flourish in every season of the soul.

We don't need to know what's going to come, good or bad, for us to be able to enter into that decision even today.

And so, just for a moment, just thinking about the timeline of Joseph's life.

And maybe you're familiar with his story, and maybe not.

If we just kind of look at the positive and negative turns, it's a great movie.

Somebody really needs to do this movie, but the positive and negative turns, it's a it's it's kind of like a whiplash going through the life of Joseph.

It starts off really good and it gets really bad really fast, right?

And so let's just look at a couple things.

Just imagine you are on kind of the ladder of good and bad in the life of Joseph, okay?

So let's just start down here.

All right.

So we start in the life of Joseph.

He's loved by his father so much that he gets a handcrafted coat.

Okay, things are going pretty well.

Let's do a step up for Joseph, all right?

Um, he's one of his father's favorite sons.

Okay, great.

That's that's awesome.

Until his brothers decided that because of that, they were jealous of him and they hated him.

That's not good, all right?

Let's call that a negative turn, all right?

Let's go down.

But we see that Joseph is gifted by God both to receive dreams, and later on we'll we'll hear that he interprets dreams.

Okay, okay, sweet.

So he's 17.

We already know that he's a dreamer.

Um, but because of his brother's hatred for him, they decide to sell him into slavery.

All right?

I'm gonna call that down four steps, all right?

Let's just call that a really bad day.

Um has anybody been sold into slavery by their brothers or sisters, all right?

Um so that did not go very well.

But as soon as he goes into the land of Egypt, he goes into the house of Potiphar, who's the leader of Pharaoh's army.

And he's a slave in Potiphar's house, and immediately he starts to gain some success.

All right, so let's call that two steps up.

He's entrusted with more responsibility, but didn't last long because then he's falsely accused by Potiphar's wife of trying to sleep with her.

Okay, so let's go back down a step.

Um and because of his accused falsely, um, that gets him thrown in prison.

Let's go that, let's let's take that down even one more step, all right?

So he's back in prison.

But in prison, he starts to experience God's favor and he earns the trust of the warden and put in charge of other prisoners.

Let's go up a step.

He starts to interpret dreams in prison and and gains favor with the other uh prisoners.

Okay, so let's let's go up.

He's he's doing well in prison.

But he interprets the cupbearer's dream, which goes well, but the cupbearer gets promoted.

He doesn't, he does not, the cupbearer forgets who Joseph is.

Okay, let's let's bring that back down.

Now, after that, though, he stays in and he stays in and he stays in.

He's faithful, he's faithful, he's faithful.

He's eventually elevated to second in command of Egypt.

But right behind Pharaoh, he is entrusted because he faithfully interprets Pharaoh's dreams and serves the nation of Egypt, which he had no intention of doing.

He gets elevated to second in command.

And in that place of command, his family comes back to Egypt to get food because of a famine.

So he reunites with his family, and in doing so, he's able to forgive them, he's able to reconcile for them.

He provides his family during famine, and because of that, over time, in a way that Joseph never anticipated, he reconciles with his enemies, and his life leads to the saving of the entire nation of Israel.

Now, isn't it fascinating to see the ups and the downs, the twists and the turns in the process?

And the reason it's important to look at that in the life of Joseph is because it's probably not a lot different for many of us.

When you look at your timeline, and if you were to map your timeline and look at the positive turns and the negative turns, positive turns, negative turns, you probably could point to a lot of the same things.

But the reason this is important, I believe, is because when we look at the trajectory of our lives, I believe that what God wants to build into us, just like he built into Joseph, was a kind of resilience and endurance into his life.

I know many people, and you do too, who get stuck in cycles of despair, depression, discouragement for things far less than being sold into slavery by their siblings.

And what happens is oftentimes when we walk through unideal circumstances in our life, when we walk through a detour or a delay, and the pace of life is not what we expected, not what we thought God promised, what that does to us oftentimes is it subverts us into a lesser storyline.

And I believe that we're in a season, this is going to continue to become very important, that we must learn what it means to be a steadfast people no matter what comes.

We have to be a persevering and enduring and anchored people with eyes, with faces set like flint with the days given to us while we are still on this earth, to be anchored in the storyline and the promises of God.

Are you guys with me?

So, how is it though, as we're kind of just opening up the story together for the first time, how is it that a 17-year-old boy like Joseph is able to be tossed around and kind of go back and forth and up and down over the course of a decade and still conclude at the very end that God was with them the entire time?

How does a 17-year-old make that decision?

How does a 17-year-old not waver in everything?

We don't get a single indication that he ever has a moral failure, that he that there's character flaws that are keeping him from progressing into whatever God has for him.

We don't have a single clue on that.

For all we can see, that his storyline and the character from which he lived is just uh marked by faithfulness and integrity and purity of heart.

Now, we may maybe there's other details that were left out of the story, but what we see is that every time he steps foot, either good or bad, he he he stays faithful to what he had been given in that season.

How can we become the same kind of people that can withstand unideal circumstances and not give into a victim mindset while we're at it?

I believe for Joseph and I believe for us, this has to do with the story that we tell ourselves and the story that we are living in.

All of us are living into a story, whether you think you are or not.

And so for Joseph, kind of the back-end thing, and this is kind of all above the text, this isn't right in the text, but this is the context surrounding this whole story as we're starting the year and as we're starting this passage together.

I think this is important to look at.

When we meet Joseph at the age of 17, we had we know this.

We know about Joseph that he was the son of Jacob.

He grew up hearing stories from his father Jacob, and that time that Jacob wrestled with a man out in the dark all night, and why why his father had a limp now, and why his name used to be Jacob, but now it's Israel.

We we know that Joseph probably heard stories of told by his grandfather Isaac of that time when he was a kid, and his his great grandfather almost sacrificed him at an altar because he was being obedient to God.

But that at the last minute a ram came out of the thicket, and it was the Lord's provision, and it was the salvation of God, and it was a reminder of a covenant.

That God made that your descendants will be like the sand on the seashore, your descendants will be like the stars in the sky.

I'm doing something among you that is going to be so great that from your family line is going to come one who is going to remove the stain of sin once and for all and restore the intimacy, the relationship between heaven and earth.

And so Joseph, we know him and his brothers grew up even as young men, inheriting the promises of God, being told by their whole family of what God had done in the past and what God would continue to do through their lives.

It wasn't just about them, it was about something bigger.

We know that God gave Joseph dreams and the night, and that from a young age that had helped him developed a language with God, which he could, he knew that God was speaking to him.

And from a young age, his internal compass was dialed into a story that was so much bigger than his own personal plot line.

Guys, we need a story that is bigger than our own personal plot line.

We need to live in a story that can carry us in every season that God has walked, has us lived through.

Joseph was living into the story of God in such a way that he was able to bear whatever came his way.

And again, we're all living into a story.

We are all living a story that we tell to ourselves.

And here's kind of the big idea.

The story you live in is the story you will live out.

The story you live in is the story that you will live out.

And to the degree that you're aware of the story that you're living in, it has a complete connection to the person you're becoming and the story that your life is telling.

There's a lot of stories we can tell.

Somebody said it like this in our lives, our lives are almost like two rails on the same track.

One is the events of our lives, the things that have happened to us, or the things that we've done, or the things that the experiences we have.

The other rail is our interpretation of those events and what we tell ourselves those things mean.

You guys with me?

One is what happened, the other thing is our interpretation of what happened.

How many of you guys know those aren't always the same thing?

What happens to us, because we're story-making beings, this is how God wired us.

He wired us to be storytelling creatures.

When we walk through life circumstances, we often assign meaning and interpretation to those things, whether it's accurate or not.

And the degree to which we are able to realign with our interpretation with God's interpretation is the story that we is the degree to which we are set free to live into his purposes.

So, like last week, we were in Costa Rica and uh we went down to the beach, and uh on at one of the beaches, we got there, and like within 30 seconds we're down in the water.

My daughter Amelie uh screams out in pain and she was stung by a jellyfish.

Okay?

Not terrible, but enough for an little eight-year-old girl to be upended, right?

And uh she came back and she was crying, and it was about we're comforting her.

And then she came to the conclusion like, I will never go into the ocean for the rest of my life.

You know, like she she's just like, she I mean, she she's crying.

She's like, she's like, I I want to go home.

I don't want to ever go back into the ocean.

And the story that she was telling herselves was after this particular, you know, she's stung by a jellyfish, and she essentially starts telling her the story, to herself the story of, I've learned from this moment that oceans can never be trusted, right?

Oceans are full of pain and suffering.

I shall never enter the ocean for the rest of my life because this is good, there's only more of this waiting for me, right?

And so she started, you know, she starts making these huge bombastic claims about after this jellyfish, and certainly we're just helping the pain go away.

We're just trying to do everything we can to make this pain, and then help her to just like realize, like, yeah, that that was terrible.

We're really sorry that that happened.

But that's not always going to happen when you go back to the ocean.

It happened once, but that doesn't mean that it's always, always gonna be like that, right?

And it's it's a small version.

You guys can kind of see how that even applies to a lot of us.

We go through things and we say, because of this certain thing, I can no longer entrust myself to these kinds of people, I can no longer give myself in love, I can never pursue these things anymore.

Everything is now on me.

It's up to me to figure this out.

I can never forgive, I can never do this, and we start to make claims and interpretations based on our life, and those become a story that we start to live into and a story that we tell with our lives.

There's a lot of competing stories, and it comes out in our language.

Some people you'll hear, and maybe you even say this, stories like this: nothing ever goes my way.

That's a victim story.

Nothing ever goes my way.

Or maybe you've said it like this: it's all on me.

It's all on me.

Maybe you live with a pressure of like, there's nobody that's gonna help me.

It's all on me.

And then that story gets accentuated by living in the United States in this hyper-entrepreneurial culture where everything is about starting new businesses and starting everything, everything is about achievement when there's nothing wrong with those things, but it can start to heap on this thing, the storyline of everything good that happens in my life, it's only gonna happen if I do it.

I have to make it, I have to pull, I have to, I have to take the bull by the horns, right?

It's all on me.

And maybe you've said it like this I'm all on my own, which is a little bit different.

That there's nobody that's going to be with me.

That's the that's a story that an orphan would say to themselves.

I'm on my own, and any anything good I have to go provide for by myself.

Maybe you say this, there's never enough.

A storyline that says, There's never enough.

Which would be a poverty storyline of everything is always, there's always a lack.

There's never enough relationships, there's never enough money, there's never enough opportunities, there's never enough food, there's never enough for the things that I need.

In a secular, as our society is becoming even more secular, um, there's, you know, there's a storyline that would say, this is all there is.

There's nothing more than this right here.

This is all there is.

There's not another life, there's not an unseen realm.

This is it.

This is all there is and all there ever will be.

From a consumer point of view, which we're discipled, we've been discipled into a consumer culture.

Um there's a story that says, if I only had more, you're always one more acquisition away from the good life.

You guys know what I'm saying?

We're always just about there.

If I just had just a little bit more.

And and so we look at sayings like this: which one are you?

Which one sticks out to you?

And maybe it could be different from this list.

Maybe you're not sure which one is you, but I'll tell you this: the story that you tell yourself, the story that you're telling yourself will always come out when things don't go your way.

If you want to know the story that you're living into, the story that you're telling yourself when things don't go your way is the best indication of the person we're becoming.

So pay attention next time you get in a fight with your spouse, you get sideways with your spouse, what is the story you start telling yourself about you or about your spouse?

What about when things are not going well at work or you're stuck, you feel stuck in a dead-end job?

What is the story you start telling yourself about that?

About God, about the people that you're working with?

What about when you lose money in the stock market?

What is the story that you start telling yourself about what that means for you?

There's all kinds of scripts that get baked into us over time.

But I believe what happens is that when we start following Jesus, and part of the life of following Jesus is he starts to replace every bad news script with the good news of the gospel.

And this is how we change the script.

This is how, this is this is how we move from one storyline into another, is we have to start rehearsing the real storyline.

And the real storyline is the reality created in the Father and the Son and the Spirit, and everything He's intended for you, and everything that He is working in His own strength to accomplish in our lives and on this world in this world for all of time.

The real storyline is God's interpretation of our lives and his commitment to our flourishing no matter what season comes in our life.

So Isaiah 61 is the perfect example of this.

In Isaiah 61, we read this messianic prophecy when Isaiah is, he's he's proclaiming the ministry of Jesus, the ministry of the Messiah, and he says, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he's anointed me to what?

To preach good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to set the captives free.

You guys catch that.

The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he's anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

Basically, another way of saying that is bringing good news stories to the poor.

He is anointing, he anoints us, he anointed Jesus to change the script, and he his spirit anoints us to preach good news, which is an alternate story, that what something has happened in Christ so significant that what I am left with is no longer what I'm left with.

I'm left with his intentions for my life, not just my best effort.

That I'm left with his provision, I'm left with his direction.

I'm left with um uh I am not no longer only just poor, I am rich because of what God has done in me.

To bind up the brokenhearted, to go to the brokenhearted and say, listen, your life is no longer in fragments, you can become whole.

There is a provision of you, there's an alternate story that doesn't involve your life being broken into pieces, and you can be bound up and made whole again.

That's a new kind of story, right?

To to proclaim to those who are held captive that you no longer have to live in prison.

That is an alternate story that is possible in Christ, that when we come into Christ, the things that bind us, the things that uh hold us captive, the things that chain us together can be broken in the name of Jesus.

We no longer have to be, have a captive mindset.

We can be free in the name of Jesus.

That's an alternate story.

That's a good news story.

So the gospel is the good news that invites us into a new storyline, which means this: like Joseph, see, Joseph had this baked into his family heritage, his family culture.

They just rehearsed the story of God.

They lived, they were born into the story of God, they rehearsed the story of God.

And so when Joseph has started being tossed around, he's going to a land he doesn't know, he's enslaved, we get no indication that he was wavering with who he was because in inside of him, and he would later conclude this, and we'll get to this in the next couple weeks, he'll later conclude this that in everything that he experienced, God was in it all, and what the enemy meant for evil, God intended to use for good.

The only type of person that can conclude that is one who is saturated and permeated into the story of God, not just their own personal plot line.

You guys with me?

So, what does that mean?

That like Joseph, he grew up in a family culture where they would just talk about God.

They would talk about what God's purpose is and God's covenants.

We have to do the same thing.

We have to rehearse the gospel story in our lives, or we get caught up in lesser stories.

We need a story that is big enough, resilient enough, enduring enough to carry us through the storms of life.

And so I just need to ask you, what are the stories that you're rehearsing every day?

And we've we've over the last few weeks, you've heard about this practice that we have, this practice that we encourage in this body, that churches everywhere encourage, but I think it's one of the most foundational commitments and habits that we have in our life, which is a daily immersion into the scriptures, into the word of God, that the gospel might rewrite our story every day of our lives.

A daily waking up to God's reality and his interpretation about who he is and what his intentions are for us, what he's done, and now who we are because of what he's done.

And sometimes we talk about these things.

Hey, you need to read your Bible every day.

You know, that's what good Christians do, right?

Read my Bible and give my quiet time every day.

Guys, listen.

Every day we have a choice.

We're being discipled into other stories.

When you pick up your phone right right away and you're checking news, when you pick up your phone right away and you're just immediately in Facebook and Instagram, what you're doing is you're allowing everybody else to tell you what's the most important story of the day before you're waking up to the voice of your creator, level setting your life into a reality that is eternal and enduring and cannot be stolen from you.

Anybody?

I believe that what it takes to live into the story of God is a commitment to make his version and his covenant and his plan prominent in our lives.

And that's why I think the commitment of scriptures before screens is one that every Christian should adopt in a technology-driven age.

Scriptures before screens.

Why?

Because there's only one that has the bread of life that can nourish us from the inside out.

And see, what happens is many of us, and this is probably some of us in this room, many of us live in perpetual disappointment because we've forgotten the storyline that we were invited to live into.

We're left on our own to try to figure out what our lives mean and what is got what God is doing and what's happening.

And we're disappointed because our lives are different than what we feel like we are promised.

And sometimes even our language in church isn't super helpful with this.

Because oftentimes we hear uh phrases like, God has a plan for your life.

No, I'm not saying he doesn't have a plan for your life.

I'm just saying when we use phrases like, God's got a plan for your life, we think of it in such narrow terms that there's like one specific thing that God has like literally like orchestrated every single step of my life.

There's no agency for me to be with God.

It's like there's one specific thing, one specific path.

It's up to me to stay on that path.

If I mess it up or somebody else gets in the way, or there's a detour along the way, then that's gonna blow this whole thing up.

And so what happens is oftentimes our 17-year-old version looks at our 41-year-old version or 55-year-old version or our six or our 67-year-old version, and we're reconciling everything that's happened in the course of our life, and it didn't turn out the way that we expected.

And there's a little bit of shame because we are told all along that uh that God's got a plan for your life, but it turns out that for a lot of us, God didn't give us a plan, he just gave us himself.

God doesn't give us a plan, he gives us a person who is Jesus Christ.

Now listen, I'm not saying God doesn't have a plan for your life, but some of us get so obsessed with finding the specific thing and what it's supposed to look like that we miss the living, breathing God who is leading us around all the detours and delays, and he was with us the entire time.

You guys with me here?

Listen, if God has a plan for your life, he will make that clear to you in no uncertain terms.

Okay?

He's gonna do this.

He's gonna show up to you and say, Listen, I want you to build a boat.

I want you to spend the next 100 years building the best boat anybody's ever seen.

And you're gonna save civilization.

Like, okay, I guess that's what I'm doing with my life.

I'm building a boat.

Thank you, Noah.

We all can just get a little golf clap for Noah.

That's why we're here right now.

Thank you, Noah, for responding to that.

I'm glad I'm grateful God had a plan for his life that involved a giant boat and a lot of animals.

Um God has a plan for your life, he's gonna come up to you and say things like, he's gonna send an angel to you to say things like this.

You're pregnant.

And it doesn't make any sense, but you're pregnant right now and you're gonna give birth to the Son of God.

All right.

Oh, okay.

Thanks for letting me know.

That's a that's a great plan for my life, right?

Um, most of us we don't have we don't have that.

God didn't show up with this architectural map of everything.

Maybe he planted in you dreams, maybe he planted in it in you purpose.

And I'm not making light, I'm not saying that that's not important.

I just know too many believers, too many Christians who live in perpetual disappointment and shame of their life not being more than what it is, forgetting that God didn't say, Come and follow my plan.

Jesus came and say, Come and follow me.

Come and follow me.

Meaning, whatever comes, whatever your life is today, there is an invitation from the living God that I am with you, and all you need to do is to respond to my voice.

And as soon as you respond to his voice, you are now smack, smack in the middle of the story of God, not just your own plot line.

This is great news, guys.

That means for all of us here today, all of us have the potential to live into the story of God.

And when you do, your life can bear fruitfulness and meaning and purpose, and you can be anchored.

I love that the life with the Father is one of creativity and one where he doesn't just tell us what to do all the time, but he says, What do you want to create together?

It's almost like a father who lays a big butcher paper out and says, Hey, what do you want?

What kind of life do you want to draw together?

And we get to co-create with God, which also means that when we get to unideal circumstances, and we'll get to this in the next few weeks, when we when we hit up and we get tripped up, like this wasn't part of the plan, we get to not just be left by ourselves, we can say, All right, God, I didn't expect this, but I know that you are a good father, and I know that you can take whatever is coming after me, and you will transition it into a story that is good.

That whatever the enemy means for evil, you will turn to good.

So this morning, I I'm gonna park it there this morning, but I just want to do this, just with me across the room.

You just close your eyes.

And I want to pray for us here today.

We're starting a new year.

And it's a time of reset, it's a time of always just kind of taking inventory, and we have to take inventory of where we're actually at.

Not where we hope to be or we thought we should be, but where we are.

And it's possible that in this room here today, many of us maybe we feel stuck in an old story, and and it just it feels like we're uh constantly working against ourselves, uh trying to get somewhere else.

Maybe maybe for some of us, because we didn't expect to be fired, because we didn't expect those divorce papers, because you didn't expect that diagnose that diagnosis, there's this this resentment that's built up.

It's like, God, where were you this entire time?

Like what what is happening here?

And if you're honest, there's like this frustration.

This is all an interruption, this is all something else.

And it's this kind of perpetual chronic disappointment.

And I just want to proclaim to you today there's good news.

And the good news is this that God and started something with his son, that God in Christ came himself to reconcile us to him.

So he created the entire world out of his love, out of the overflow of his love, and because of sin, that that image of God he intended, the fullness of life he intended for us to live in, was marred and it was broken.

And ever since then, through the prophets and the Old Testament, through the law, he was he was he was doing his best to make a way uh for us to to come to know him, but that couldn't be fulfilled until he came himself and did what no other man or what no other system could.

Do he came himself, and Jesus came and he lived with us and he descended to us and he ultimately allowed himself to be betrayed and to be mocked and to have his life taken from him.

And he actually laid down his life for us.

And because of that, he made a way back to the Father.

And this new covenant, in this new covenant, he's given us his spirit so that as we receive his spirit, we can live into this new story and journey with Jesus to be agents of blessing and healing.

And even in our lives, and we are trying to make sense of what God is doing in our lives, we can live the kind of life born of the Spirit, knowing that even though we don't always know what's going on in our lives, that God is the finisher of our story.

He may not have authored everything that has happened in your life, but I guarantee you he will finish the story.

He's going to finish it the way he wants to finish it.

That means your story is not over.

And today you can enter into the story of God and say, God, I entrust myself back to you.

I just want to give you a moment here today.

If there's anything that you need to acknowledge with God, even saying, God, I need the gospel to write a new story in my life.

You just confess that.

And Jesus, I pray over us as a people as we enter into this year, God, that you would bring your scriptures alive.

That we'd become the kind of people who are living in the story of God for the sake of the world.

I thank you that your scriptures are not just about self-improvement and good information and encouraging pick me up in the morning.

It's about rewriting the script from the inside out.

I thank you, God, that we are a people who are forgiven, that we are your beloved, that in you we are healed and made whole, that salvation has come to us through your name.

That you can, that you're writing a story of meaning and purpose and life.

And you will continue to do that as we respond to you.

So I just pray for us as a church, as a community, Lord God, that we would be a people about the story of God in Colorado, the story of God in Boulder County, the story of God in the United States, the story of God in the entire world.

That we'd be given to your story in a way that anchors us in every season of the soul.

I bless you, Church of the Lookout family, to know his voice and his story.

And it's in Jesus' name.

We pray.

Amen.

Amen.

We good?

Alright, let's stand.

Let's stand.

Let's stand.

I want to encourage you.

Listen, I mean it when I say it.

Start the journey with this.

If you have not adopted a daily habit of rehearsing the story of God, just bringing yourself to the scriptures in such a way that it bears life and fruit, that it changes your perspective of God, that it changes your perspective of yourself and of the world.

I encourage you to do that.

Today's scripture is this, and the butt, the bread Bible reading plan.

All you have to do is go to the lookout.church slash Bible, and you can download the 2025.

It's a daily reading plan.

It's not too heavy, but it's something that we can track with this year, okay?

Here's the scripture for today, and we'll end with this, and I'll get you guys out of here.

Isaiah 49 says, Listen to me, O coastlands, and give attention, you peoples from afar.

The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother, he named He named my name.

He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me.

He made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away.

And he said to me, You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.

But I said, I have labored in vain, and I have spent my strength for nothing in vanity, yet surely my right is with the Lord, and my recompense with my God.

Come on, if anybody in here has thought, I have labored in vain, the good news for you today is that your inheritance is with the Lord, and he is the finisher of your story.

Amen.

Come on, amen.

Let's give it up for Jesus, the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Listen, as we as we end today, I'm gonna have the ministry team come forward, and these are people who are available to pray with you.

If you just want to come up and pray if anything going on in your life, you want to pray this morning.

I encourage you to do that.

Receive prayer.

If you want to talk about what a relationship with Jesus is and receive salvation, come forward and pray and receive salvation.

If you have kids, you can go get them.

And guess I will meet you in the back.

I'd love to meet you in the back and are connect with this sign.

I just want to bless you.

May the Lord bless you and keep you.

May He make His face to shine upon you.

Maybe He be gracious to you and give you peace.

All right.

Love you guys.

Go in the peace of the kingdom.